The Informationally Underserved: Not Always Diverse, but Always a Social Justice Advocacy Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionThe theory of and model for the Informationally Underserved (IU) (Froggatt, 2014) illustrates a social justice research methodology and findings that demands advocacy. This lead(s) to actions based on principles of equitable access to information, balance in collections, and mediation between information seekers and content (Budd, 2001). The purpose of this paper is to exemplify IU theory and findings in order to compel Library and Information Science (LIS) instructors, graduate students and professional school librarians (PSLs) to integrate social justice theories (Froggatt, 2014; Rioux, 2010) and equitable information access issues within their research, teaching, learning, and practice.The IU research spawned from Elfreda Chatman's research (1996) about information poverty. The School Library Impact Studies (SLIS), which provides powerful data about the positive impact of school access on standardized test achievement (Baughman, 2000; Lance, 2000; Kachel, 2011; LRS, 2013), provoked wondering about learning without a school library. This author, a school librarian for a diverse, American, urban high school, discovered that 40% of her students who, prior to age 15, were educated in schools without libraries. Did this social justice inequity impact their learning? IU research found the opposite of the SLIS findings: little or no access to active school programs (ASLP) prior to age 15, or when most American youth begin high school, demonstrated a weak relationship with poor standardized test performance and impacts extracurricular information seeking. Describing the IU educational context puts forward this conundrum: One needs knowledge about a given subject in order to locate and create new knowledge about it. The IU suffer from this information paradox (Shenton, 2007) and have a right to the transformational-formational challenge of learning through the school library (Todd & Kuhlthau, 2005).The Right to Equitable Access to InformationTheodore Sizer stated that is the fuel for freedom...a right, (Plaut, 2009, p.x). Learning without a school denies children the liberty to further their education as independent life-long learners, a foundational principle of a democratic society (AASL, 2007; Jaeger & Burnett, 2010). Lack of access to information is in direct opposition to this right and is the antithesis of the long-held altruistic stances of the LIS profession (Rioux, 2010, p. 14). Rioux's (2010) social justice meta-theory rekindles this ethic and suggests that LIS theory and discourse incorporate these five assumptions:1. All human beings have an inherent worth and deserve information services that help address their information needs.2. People perceive reality and information in different ways, often within cultural or life role contexts.3. There are many different types of information and knowledge, and these are societal resources.4. Theory and research are pursued with the ultimate goal of bringing positive change to service constituencies.5. The provision of information services is an inherently powerful activity. Access, control, and mediation of information contain inherent power relationships. The act of distributing information is itself a political act. (p. 13)Learners of any age have the right to access a library's social capital building (Bundy, 2008) to glean the richness of a library's body of knowledge. ASLP provide participatory collaboratively planned learning, which offers inquiry-focused activities that integrate academic content with information literacy skills. This is a marriage of constructivism (Dewey, 1997), critical thinking and resource-based learning (Farmer & James, 2008; Neuman, 2004) that cultivates self-reflection, self-correction, and self-regulation (Gordon, 2009a, p.63) to craft connections between new information and existing knowledge (Gordon, 2009b, p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".